Chicago taxpayers may have to spend another nearly $14 million to compensate two defendants framed for murders by corrupt Chicago police Det. Reynaldo Guevara.
The settlements will come before the City Council’s finance committee on Monday, along with a $6 million payout to the family of a man killed after another police chase gone wrong.
Forty-three people, including three women, have been exonerated after they were sent to prison on murder convictions in cases handled by Guevara in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of them lived in Humboldt Park.
As of last winter, lawsuits targeting him already cost the city and county at least $80 million. In February, City Council approved another $29.2 million linked to allegations of his police misconduct.
At the time, the law department recommended approval of the Guevara-related settlements, saying they would “reduce financial exposure and bring the matters to a responsible close.”
Last year, Mayor Brandon Johnson came under fire for borrowing money, to be repaid over five years, to bank roll a $90 million global settlement that put to rest 176 lawsuits tied to former Chicago police Sgt. Ronald Watts, who was accused of framing hundreds of people on drug charges at the Chicago Housing Authority’s Ida B. Wells complex.
The two new settlements are expected to turn up the heat on city corporation counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry to strike a similar global settlement, resolving dozens of remaining Guevara cases.
In 1998, Mariano and Jacinta Soto were stabbed to death in their home and their two children — a two-month old daughter and a three-year old son — were kidnapped.
Gabriel Solache and Arturo DeLeon-Reyes said they falsely confessed to the gruesome crimes after they were interrogated for over 40 hours, beaten by Guevara, and deprived of food and water.
The day of the killing, Adriana Mejia, who lived in the same building as Solache and DeLeon-Reyes, told her husband she’d given birth to a child and had agreed to watch another woman’s son whom she’d met at the hospital. A week later, a relative saw the news of the Soto murders and recognized the children from Mejia’s home. Solache and DeLeon-Reyes accompanied the woman’s husband to bring the boy to the police station, at his request. DeLeon-Reyes was sentenced to life in prison and Solache was sentenced to death. Each man spent nearly 20 years in prison before their charges were dismissed.
Johnson is facing an $882.4 million shortfall next year, driven in part by the mountain of legal settlements. The city is attempting to reject the full cost of legal settlements for police misconduct instead of deliberately underestimating the payouts, only to pay double and triple that amount.
This time, officials are estimating $400 million for 2027 settlements, calling that new projection the “largest driver” of the city’s increased costs.
“We want to be very transparent about the cost of these settlements and judgments that are related to actions that occurred decades ago,” said acting Budget Director Jonathan Ernst.
The $6 million settlement of another errant police chase goes to the family of Michael Jordan.
The father of three was mowed down by a driver being chased by Chicago police while sitting at a CTA bus shelter near 99th Street and Van Vlissingen Road in June 2019.
When officers attempted to stop a Jeep that had been reported stolen, the driver fled at a high rate of speed and crashed into the shelter just seconds later.